A woman and a three-year-old girl have been found dead below a Wollongong lookout, & more in News in 5.

1. A woman and a three-year-old girl have been found dead below a Wollongong lookout.

A major police operation continued overnight after a mother and child were found dead after falling from a lookout south of Sydney.

Emergency services were called to a lookout near Wollongong just before 2pm on Tuesday following a report of concern for welfare.

The woman in her early 30s and the three-year-old girl were found dead in the dense bushland below the lookout.

A number of people believed to be family members were seen at the scene on Tuesday, 9 News Sydney reported.

The Toll rescue helicopter was seen lowering paramedics into the forest below while NSW Police and NSW Ambulance crews gathered at a nearby road.

A difficult police operation to recover the woman and child’s bodies was underway on Tuesday night.

“Just seeing the police walk off and the ambulance walk off, you just go, ‘You poor buggers. I know what you are about to face when you get down there’,” Wollongong Police District commander superintendent Chris Craner told reporters at the scene.

“It’s steep, it’s hectic, we’ve got police coming in from the low side, police trekking down from the high side and the consideration of the helicopter.

“It’s a treacherous, dangerous area we need to get to, to respectfully get these people out.”

Superintendent Canner said the circumstances of the deaths were still being investigated.

“This is going to be absolutely devastating for the community. It’s going to be devastating for the family,” he said.

Wollongong police have launched an investigation and a crime scene has been established.

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The prosecution is now expected to act as the first test case of New Zealand’s terrorism laws, which were introduced in 2002 but have in past proved unwieldy.

University of Auckland law professor Bill Hodge said the charge was significantly more complex than murder, had never been tested in a prosecution in New Zealand and the law appeared to be more about overseas terrorism.

“This is new territory. I’m not sure that parliament intended it for this kind of thing,” he told AAP.

“I think it feels good and I sympathise with the motives of the prosecution … but in terms of getting a clean prosecution, it suddenly gets messy.”

The requirements of the charge would also mean the suspected white supremacist could potentially use his defence at trial as a platform or to read out his “manifesto” – which could be ruled irrelevant in a murder case, Dr Hodge said.

“It will give him a chance to use the trial as a platform because he can say: ‘I’m not a terrorist, I’m a hero’.”

But Mohamed Hussein Mostafa, whose father was killed at Al Noor Mosque, said he was glad the attack was being treated a terrorist act, given that the Muslim community had often been vilified as possible perpetrators of violence since the 9/11 attacks.

“It will cement in people’s minds that terrorism has no race or religion,” he told Reuters.

“I’m happy that he will be made an example of … so that such an atrocity may never happen again on our shores.”

The accused is being held in New Zealand’s only maximum-security jail, in Auckland, and appeared in Christchurch’s High Court by video at his last hearing in April.

He was ordered to undergo mental health assessment before his next appearance.

Prison authorities have confirmed he has had no access to television, radio, newspapers or visitors.

The toll from the attack rose to 51 earlier this month with the death of a Turkish man in Christchurch hospital, nearly 50 days after the shooting.

3. Scott Morrison secures the 76 seats he needed to form a majority government.

Photo: Brook Mitchell

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Prime Minister Scott Morrison will have the 76 seats he needs to govern in majority, but could have up to two more.

The Australian Electoral Commission took the Victorian seat of Chisholm off the "close seats" list on Tuesday afternoon, as Liberal candidate Gladys Liu gained ground.

She now holds 50.6 per cent of the vote, ahead of Labor's Jennifer Yang, as postal vote counting continues.

If the current count trends continue, the Liberal-National coalition will have 78 seats, with Labor on 67 and six crossbenchers.

There are now only two close seats listed on the AEC website.

The Liberals' Sarah Richards is ahead of Labor MP Susan Templeman in Macquarie, with the AEC website showing just 51 votes separating the pair.

In Bass, the Liberals' Bridget Archer sits on 50.4 per cent of the two-party vote, ahead of incumbent Labor MP Ross Hart.

Postal votes are being counted in all 151 seats.

The election writ must be returned by June 28.

In the previous parliament, the coalition had 74 seats, Labor had 69, there were four independents and the Greens, Centre Alliance and Katter's Australian Party had one each.

A popular teething gel produced by the Women's and Children's Hospital in Adelaide has been withdrawn from sale amid concerns babies could consume too much of the local anaesthetic lidocaine.

Deputy Director of Pharmacy Usha Ritchie says the withdrawal of the product is in line with international best practice.

"International and Australian medicines organisations warn against using the local anaesthetic lidocaine in products for infant teething," she said.

"As lidocaine is the active ingredient in the WCH Teething Gel, it will no longer be manufactured or available for sale.

"These recommendations take into account a small number of incidents overseas where infants and children have been harmed after consuming too much lidocaine."

Ms Ritchie said there had been a number of presentations at the hospital's emergency department linked to the consumption of too much teething gel, but no children in SA had suffered serious adverse effects.

She said families who used the gel in accordance with the instructions could be reassured they had not harmed their children.

Parents with teething infants were advised to use teething rings, a cold cloth to bite on or other safe items for babies to chew as an alternative.

5. Scientists warn about catastrophic rising sea levels.

Global sea levels could rise in excess of two metres - causing catastrophic consequences for the world, according to a team of international scientists.

Such a rise could result in the loss of 1.8 million square kilometres of land, including critical regions of food production, and potential displacement of up to 187 million people.

Traditional methods for predicting rising sea levels from the melting ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic are based on numerical modelling.

Such projections remain challenging due to ongoing uncertainty regarding the evolution of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, particularly in response to climate change.

A team of international scientists used a technique called structured expert judgment to ask 22 ice sheet experts to estimate plausible ranges for future sea level rises.

They asked them to consider the projected melting of each of the Greenland, West Antarctic and East Antarctic ice sheets under low and high future global temperature rise scenarios.

Lead author professor Jonathan Bamber, from the University of Bristol, said: "Structured expert judgment provides a formal approach for estimating uncertain quantities based on current scientific understanding, and can be useful for estimating quantities that are difficult to model.

"Projections of total global subsequent sea level rise using this method yielded a small but meaningful probability of subsequent sea level rise exceeding two metres by the year 2100 under the high temperature scenario, roughly equivalent to 'business as usual', well above the 'likely' upper limit presented in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

The findings suggest that coastal communities should not rule out the possibility of 21st century subsequent sea level rise in excess of two metres when developing adaptation strategies.

The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.